With a pleasant visual environment and intuitive menus, this app enables users to create groups and share georeferenced information quickly and easily via the internet.

Placetribe is the name of the application that was recently released to the web by a team of engineers from the University of Santa Maria. As its name implies, it allows the creation of “tribes” (a term referring to the urban tribes) or microgroups with Facebook friends, with whom you can share all kinds of georeferenced information.

Its creators are Placetribe’s CEO Tomás Arredondo, PhD in Electric Engineering and professor of the Electronic Department of the Universidad Santa María, his brother Matías, Bachelor degree in business administration and the students of Electric Civil Engineering and Telematics Engineering: Gabriel Juri, Carlos Ibáñez, Fabrizio Cavaleiro and Pablo Bustos.

The first two founded Placetribe SPA, a company dedicated to the development of the application, which is now incubated in the USM 3IE Institute, after having received great feedback from family and friends.

What is Placetribe?

This app was actually developed because the creators themselves realized they needed an app like this. And of course, also other people might be in the need of finding the nearest gas station or a good place to hang out, recommended by their friends. That way, you always obtain reliable and dependable information!

Besides, Matías Arredondo stresses their visual and user-friendly interface. Who does not want an interface that is easy to understand and to use?

Placetribe allows you to display a map in which you can see the location of all the members in the group. All user activity occurs in this map, which incorporates GPS to determine your location and also allows you to display accurately and without complicated menus places that may be of interest to the “tribe”.

But this is not all: Via Placetribe you can also find out about places or discounts recommended by your friends which is made totally easy by using the real-time chat. And even companies can create their campaigns and offers.

Simply create and search groups with common interests, which can be about sports, social activities etc., share resources such as cars or exchange services in an easy and convenient way.

“The great advantage of this platform is that it joins services, products, users and georeferenced information in one place, based on the user’s profile”,

explain the CEO.

Great success and expansion!

Even though the application has only been online for a short time, the platform is already being used by users in countries such as Spain and Argentina. This, combined with the great acceptance the app received when being presented at several fairs, lets the team of Placetribe hope for about 10.000 active users until the end of the year.

Additionally, it is planned to develop the app for iPhone and Android during the second semester of 2012, which they are currently working on. This development can now be achieved even faster, because the team received seed funding from CORFO Chile.

The Placetribe team is satisfied with the work done so far. Especially taking into account that the application is in alpha stage, i.e. a test phase during which you can receive great feedback from users.

To access and try out this cool new app, you only have to enter their webpage with your Facebook account.